lime water

If you're going to use whole dried kernel corn to make your own masa and cornmeal for whole grain corn recipes, you'll need to know how to make lime water. Soaking corn in lime water breaks down the anti-nutrients that can cause pellagra, which is a deficiency of vitamin B3. The soaking (at least 7 hours) makes the niacin in the corn more nutritionally available.

Fortunately, making lime water is easy. The hardest thing that I found about it was locating lime, or “cal”. I eventually went to a local Mexican grocery store to buy a container of “cal” (pickling lime).